02 October 2013 1:52 PM

Bicycle Thieves

Many years ago, and I think it must have been in the old Hampstead Everyman Cinema, I went to see ‘Bicycle Thieves’, one of the greatest films ever made, ranking alongside ‘The Battle of Algiers’ for power and thought . I have known for years that I ought to see it again – as DVDs make that so cheap and easy. But I hesitated, because I remembered above all that it is also one of the saddest, most distressing films ever made.

For those who have not seen it, I will summarise the plot but not reveal the ending. It is in Italian, but you will find that after about a minute you forget that you are reading subtitles. It is in black and white but it is so beautifully filmed that after about a minute you will forget that it is not in colour. It has no great stars, but some of the most poignant, convincing acting you are ever likely to see.

Set in Rome in 1948, it reminds us of why Italy so nearly slipped into the Communist camp at the start of the cold war. Neither victorious nor defeated in the recent Great Moral War, Italy at this time was anything but prosperous. Rome, a city that has always teetered on the edge of the Third World, is shown – for a poor family – as a place of great bleakness, the brilliance of the sunlight and the grandeur of the buildings only emphasising the bare shortages of daily life.

The central character, Antonio Ricci, is unemployed. He has pawned his bicycle to feed his growing family (one small son, one helpless baby). A crowd of jobless men are waiting for news of work at an informal labour exchange. Ricci’s name is called and he is summoned from his small flat in some vast , half-finished housing project. He can have a job, sticking film posters on the walls of Rome. But only if he can provide his own bicycle. Pathetically, he protests that his bicycle is ‘under repair’, too ashamed to admit that he has pawned it. ‘No bike, no job’, the official tells him. Others shout that they will take the job if he won’t.

He hurries home. His wife, her face full of a sort of desperate hope, washes and irons the family’s bed-linen, a prized dowry and their only worthwhile possession. They go to the pawnshop – a giant warehouse which turns out to be crammed to its rafters with other people’s bed-linen, and are humiliated by being told that they will get less because most of the sheets have been used. If these scenes don’t gnaw at your soul, there’s something wrong with you.

But what’s worse in a way is the brief period of happiness and optimism that follows, as the bike is recovered, the job secured, and the machine lovingly polished by Ricci’s small son, who is going through that intensely moving stage where boys copy their fathers and admire them unconditionally. At dawn, the two go off together on the bike, able to spurn the crammed bus in which their neighbours are forced to travel into Rome – a scene that reminded me greatly of pre-Yeltsin Moscow and its almost inhuman vastness and seething crowds flowing in the twilight like tides.

And then the machine is stolen. Most of the film is taken up with Ricci’s hunt, first for the bike, and then for the thieves. He encounters a great deal of cruelty and disappointment as the day wears on. We see his terrible moral decay as he grows more desperate - and proves yet again that fundamentally good people simply lack the ruthlessness to take to crime themselves, and that without a general level of civilisation goodness becomes almost impossible. We see life from its underside, the world of the luckless, the workless, the weak, about as bleakly as it is possible to see it. The worst moment of all is when, in despair and exasperation, Ricci strikes his son. The utter brilliance of Enzo Staioli in the role of the son has to be seen (he grew up, wonderfully enough, to be a maths teacher, and I have a feeling he must have been a very good one) . Child actors are often rather horrible. In this case, the boy is utterly believable and there is no sickly sentimentality at all.

The word which occurs, again and again, as I think about this film is ‘Truth’. We may, for a while, have staved off the harsh truth stated in ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ true for societies as well as individuals, that ‘if you don’t work, you starve’. But do we realise how precarious our lives are, or understand the moral forces that enable us to live as we do?

A similar reminder is given in the great scenes at the start of the Third Man, where the Viennese middle classes are shown hawking their most precious possessions, for money to buy bread. I have seen this happen, in Gorbachevian Moscow and in post-invasion Baghdad, and , in seeing it, wondered if it would ever happen to me. I still do.

But it’s not just that. There’s also that rare thing, simplicity – no elaborate tricks are used, no stunts or special effects, just life filmed as it really happened, in real streets and squares and alleyways. Nobody can watch it without being a better person afterwards. It’s worth 90 minutes of anyone’s time. But it may be years before you can nerve yourself to watch it again.

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Another vivid, very unpleasant memory was evoked by this piece.
Around 2003 I was sitting in an internet cafe on the very busy Brixton Road, near the market. I observed a man walk up to some bicycles chained to a rack outside and with an enormous hack-saw proceed to saw through the chain of a nice bike.
I looked up from the computer and gave him a bold look to but to my consternation he returned my look with one of absolutely crazed evil. This man was unkempt, he look mad as a bat.
I confess I cowered in the internet club and did absolutely nothing to interfere. One never forgets such displays of one's own cowardice. (And I speak as someone who has an award for bravery from the Royal Humane Society for saving someone's life.) I rather believe 99% of people do not admit to them either.

@mikebarnes
I have very little remorse about the incident. Tootling happily along Suffolk lanes on a Vespa after a few pints of Greene King IPA on a summer's evening is an experience not to be missed. My only regret is that the rozzers collared me.
What I do feel strongly about is that being terminally and remorselessly boring ought to be classifed as a criminal offence at least as serious as the stealing of bicycles.
Under this new legislation both you and Stephen Fry would be safely locked up and innocent citizens could go safely about their business.

@ SG kinsman.
Having no criminal record yet then saying except for a drunk driving conviction is an oxymoron.
What you should have said as one with a criminal record for a serious crime ..... Lots of people consider this particular crime as very serious indeed .others that consider it superfluous, well one could never take anything they say as serious, ever !!!

To the canon of writing or film that describes how people behave in desperate circumstances I would add A Woman in Berlin by Marta Hillers. It is an autobiographical description of the experiences of an attractive woman living in Eastern Berlin as the Soviet Army arrives. The electricity fails, then the water fails, then she is repeatedly raped by different men until she attaches herself to a protector.

After a period of not following P Hitchens's blog it was a great joy to come back to it and to read this piece. (I skip his long ramblings about drug use.) Hitchen's writing is terribly refreshing.

I loved this thought: fundamentally good people simply lack the ruthlessness to take to crime themselves.

I doubt that I am a fundamentally good person, but I have got to the age of 50 without a criminal record other than being arrested for drunk-driving. But I would have severely beaten and hospitalised at least three men in my life if I had both the guts and the fighting skills. Sadly I lack both.

Good point - diversification is recommended - especially in this day and age - and after governments have again intervened into the market place and offered insurance on your bank deposits - meaning that people do not care how risky the bank is that they place their money with.

Without this government scheme people would look to place their money with low risk banks that had low fractional reserve ratios and indulged in only low risk activities like lending to homeowners etc.

Those seeking higher returns could invest with bank indulging in the riskier casino banking activities.

But no - governments know best and off they go interfering in places they shouldnt which results in banks growing 'too big to fail' and holding the rest of us to ransom - else they bring the whole economy down with them / on us.

John Gibson - your comment wrongly supposes that what we have had in recent years is anything close to an 'ultra free market'. The energy industry, for instance, is a state-created private monopoly. Not that Miliband's proposal to introduce price caps will help matters.

"There are three kinds of pleasure;
The first is miserable to begin with and pleasurable afterwards
The second is pleasurable to begin with and miserable afterwards
The third is miserable to begin with and miserable afterwards "

The first is the pleasure that P Hitchens champions. The second kind is the pleasure predominantly sought by our culture, which doesn't want anything difficult to get in the way.

The third kind I've alway assumed must be the pleasure that mind altering drug takers reach for. Even in its subjective highs, the person cannot see how miserable their state has become.

But then we have also become a culture that defines its own truths, as if one could do that, and so the objectivity of our neighbour's insights into our state tends to be rejected.

It was meant to be Tebbitesquely humourous you numpty - funny though that you didn't spot the intended irony. You might also like to try making your posts a little more interesting for others to read, old bean.

You don't need to be arrogant to expert people to take basic precautions and safeguard their precious assets, if easily losing them would mean falling into destitution - it's just common sense.

But that's not the point of the (*let's remember FICTICIOUS*) film is it - the point it seems to be making is that decent hardworking people can fall so easily into utter destitution by one simply act of criminality or bad luck turning against them - such is the cruelty of the dog-eat-dog devil-may-care capitalist system.
I would suggest that like the chinese people today, people should start saving 1/3rd of their wages from the moment they leave school - and put it in a bank account - so that they never have to live life right on the narrow edge of poverty.

I would have thought some 'conservatives' on here would have agreed with that - as I bet they take care themselves not to live with just one last fiver in their pocket - with a child and dependent spouse to feed at home.

Hey - I could get used to this fun Thucy style of debating - you just tell the other person they're "wrong" and leave it at that!
Brilliant! No need for any kind of reasoning - just a simple one word contradiction, then off out to play on the swings for the rest of the afterrnoon. Wicked!!

Steve: many artists would take issue with Ed West's implicit identification of liberalism with creativity and innovation. Evelyn Waugh once observed: "an artist must be a reactionary - he can't go flopping along." A character in Michel Houellebecq's novel, "Atomised" notes that "all the great writes have been reactionaries: Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky". Norman Mailer, often viewed as a leftist firebrand, said the problem with liberals was that they despise ideas.

In my experience modern liberals tend to be deeply unreflective folk who simply unquestioningly imbibe the norms of the zeitgeist. The average man or woman in the street tends these days to be liberal on social issues, primarily I suspect because such folk prefer to let their betters in the corporate media do their thinking for them. That's not a recipe for creativity or innovation. If in modern times artists tend to be liberal, it's more a testament to their docile conformism than to any superior creative impulse.

Given that the whole point of the film is that the protagonist can't go out to work because someone else has stolen his bike, I found mev's coment about "getting on your bike and looking for work" hilarious for its sheer miserable arrogance of the type so often seen among hardcore market fundamentalists.

I suspect the tide of public opinion is shifting away from the Friedmanite ultra free market; even Telegraph bloggers are waking up to the fact that it is not politically sustainable to have an ongoing decline in living standards met by a shoulder-shurgging response of "oh well, that's the free market, nothing we can do". Ed Miliband has already woken up to this.

You seem to have a touching, if rather naive, faith that the free market will somehow eliminate poverty. But your assertion that 'Films that show the helplessness of 'poor' people invariably lend the viewer towards believing socialism/communism can rescue them' is just wrong

You may have already suspected this from our many previous exchanges, but your offering on this thread, and on a previous thread, convinces me that you are a died-in-the wool Tory of the 'nasty' variety.
I'm not surprised your latest comments have given rise to adverse responses of the kind that left me with a distinct feeling that 'it's not just me' then...

Steve "Oh no, not that again. Why do you see everything in the prism of the free market?"

because PH usually discusses films from a political perspective - and in this piece he makes political points in the 3rd para and again several towards the end.

Films that show the helplessness of 'poor' people invariably lend the viewer towards believing socialism/communism can rescue them - in fact its free market capitalism that brings wealth to the innovative hardworking man who would get on his bike and go look for work.

Didn't the Italian Police of the time have foot patrols of beat officers to deter such opportunist theft? Italy then was also devoutly religious, so as well as teaching the eighth commandment couldn't the church have provided bikes for the needy?

In the circumstances, a reasonable person would agree that Antonio Ricci would be justified to hate Italy but the success of Operation Gladio made any prospect of a democratically-elected communist government there unlikely.

Throughout the movie one sees the desperation and carnage that can be the human condition. The downward spiral Antonio has to self-destruction is excruciating to watch. Yet the mercy shown him, lets you know that hope does exist, as much as the points of light in Picasso's "Guernica" and the single flower that grows. We must hold onto that sense of mercy even in the midst of complete havoc of our humanity.

'was that when you 'were' a socialist then? - this fond write up regarding the struggles of the poor seems to be from someone who is still a bit red under the skin, to my mind.'

Oh no, not that again. Why do you see everything in the prism of the free market? Granted a lot of artists are politically on the left or are anarchists, though their art can be conservative in the best sense of the word. Ed West once said about artists tend to be liberal - they are innovative and creative. Roger Scruton also mentioned about certain artists like Schonberg, Matisse and Moore being conservative in their artistic striving. Its an interesting subject.

I'm never sure what the most beautiful object ever made is. Though why we're on the subject of Italy the Riva Aquamara must for me be up there. Even now Italy has an idea that beauty is truth, its why they are superb at innovative design. Its a great country of beautiful people but a very complicated one. The Third Man famously compares Italy and Switzerland of course.

This is one of those wonderful but heartbreaking films that I still cannot watch again after many years. And the film is certainly depicting bicycle thieves (in plural form…) as Mr Hitchens points out.

Interesting to think about how the word “Truth” is meant in this film. I may be watching the film again thanks to this question.

'The Gods Of The Copybook Headings' is a terrifying poem. Every line applies to the world we currently live in. Hopefully, refusing to vote for the Lib/Lab/Cons will be the first step towards saving ourselves.

Peter describes this film so eloquently. I have just watched it on You Tube and despair that nothing has changed in the human attitude today. In fact I think it has become far worse. More children are brought up in fatherless homes with no direction. Education is steeped in irrelevance. Wrongdoing is seen to have its rewards. This is just to mention but a few things going on in our so-called modern society. One day there will be a backlash when people wake up to what is happening in our world but unfortunately I fear this will take several years of darkness and savagery. Although the film is depressing to the end at least the boy and his father are shown some humanity.

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